The embodiments described herein relate generally to touch input into a computer device and, more particularly, to inputting complex data using touch-sensitive devices.
Computing devices with touch screens are becoming more common in the business world. For example, such devices are currently used in fields such as gaming, engineering systems, business intelligence, geology, science, and many others. These devices generally use touch input to receive user instructions. One example of known touch input methods is a widget that enables a user to select options and/or tune parameters. A widget may include sliders that enable a user to slide a marker to a desired point between a maximum and a minimum. A widget may also include checkboxes, radio buttons, and/or toggle buttons. Furthermore, a widget may include simple text boxes that enable a user to type via a virtual keyboard or an attached physical keyboard. Another example of known touch input tools include simple play, pause, and play control buttons. These are well known in the industry and have been applied to many different media types, including music, movies, and podcasts. Known touch input methods also include dropdown boxes, nested dropdown boxes, and spinning dropdown boxes that appear as slot machine wheels, for example.
Known touch input methods, however, are useful for only simple, one-dimensional datasets, such as control of playback of a single movie where the only tunable dimension is time. Science and engineering fields, on the other hand, often use complex datasets where functionality is grouped for ease of use. Examples of such datasets include arrays having multiple elements; pressure statistics including mean and standard deviation values; gas states including pressure, density, and temperature values; object dynamic states include position (x, y, z), velocity ({dot over (x)}, {dot over (y)}, ż), and acceleration ({umlaut over (x)}, ÿ, {umlaut over (z)}) vectors; objective definitions including minimum, maximum, and target values; and ontology such as driveline, gearbox, and gearwheel values. Known touch input methods do not easily enable existing paradigms of complex sliders and/or data tree structures to, for example, mobile applications or devices because input based on finger contact is not as precise as mouse clicks. Moreover, known touch input methods often hide data such that it cannot easily be monitored during operation.